In this exhibition ‘Into the Void’ the artists Margriet van Breevoort and Krystyna Ziach express their fascination with reality, time and space.

For her series Into the Void Krystyna Ziach’ starting point was the concept of ‘voidness’ in the literal sense, as well as in the capacity of mental space perception. Thinking of vacuity, one is confronted with nothingness and the absence of the thing, the invisible and the intangible. In this series Ziach tries to represent emptyness, in particular the way it presents itself in the spaces of railway stations, deserted and anonymous. Although railway stations have a bold industrial look, they are above all human meeting places with a strong emotional radiance, sustained by the constant flow of people arriving and departing: although man is invisible, one does still feel a human presence. Autobiographical memories play a part in this work of Ziach.

Margriet van Breevoort ‘s sculptures hold a certain beauty and have a hyperrealistic likeness, but always keep something surrealistic. Van Breevoort’s fascination is with people and their emotions: how they come to terms with everyday life and how to deal with the constant shifting of their reality. Her figures all seem to be in a state of anticipation. They are in unkown spaces, entering a void, waiting for what will come next and while waiting, time is wearing them down. Similar to Ziach’s work the figures of Van Breevoort are a visual rendition of an emotion or feeling with a specific situation and can evoke references to stories or personal experiences and memories.

Edwin Ardon gets inspired by the material he is working on. With markers he follows the lines in the wood thus discovering fairytale like lansdscapes: dreamy abstractions. In his first gallery exhibition he shows work in different sizes, all works to get lost in.

Experiments with printing techniques provide Tim Mastik with new shapes and structures. He researches the endless options of silkscreen, riso-print and stamping. The prints he makes are mostly one-offs, sometimes they come in a small edition.

Leslie Nagel’s installations and sculptures are sensory constructions of organic materials, metal and other found objects, and are constantly influenced by elements like wind, time and gravity. The core of Nagel’s work is the influence of external movements in the physical world on an individual’s inner “movements” and tendencies.

‘WHAT REMAINS, NEEDS TO BE SEEN’
WILLEM BESSELINK

Each season NL=US invites a selected artist to make an object for presentation to be displayed in a specially curated spot outside on the gallery platform. This object will undergo several new and exciting transformations during the course of the season. The object will reconfigure with each iteration represented by two important characteristics: elements and time. All changes will be carefully captured in real time by a camera to showcase the metamorphosis.

Nicole Driessens and Ivo van den Baar founded their art and design studio in 1999. They live and work in Rotterdam Charlois. From this neighborhood they extract most of their art and design concepts. As visual artists they concentrate on being part of and assimilating in their environment by collecting, selecting, creating and showing works as parts of this environment that reveals how they and other people are connected with it. The concepts can either be transformed into autonomous artworks or into design items.

‘IN DISGUISE’
RUTH BORGENICHT & ARNOUT KILLIAN
JUNE 10 – JULY 5 2017

Looks are deceiving. The works of both Ruth Borgenicht and Arnout Killian possess ambiguous traits. From a distance they conceal characteristics that only become visible when you approach the art works.
NL=US @ Pulchri Studio, Lange Voorhout 15 , Den Haag

‘NOTHING IS WHAT IT IS AND EVERYTHING IS, AS IT SEEMS’
ARNOUT KILLIAN & ANDRE KRUIJSEN
APRIL 14 – JUNE 4 2017

Killian, a painter creates mostly two-dimensional work. Kruysen, on the other hand, is a sculptor and creates three-dimensional work. While their work is in different media, both oeuvres contain a certain ambiguity and are characterized by dualism.
Are the images of Kruysen autonomous works, real proposals for public space, or utopian models? His wall objects seem to refer to masks, but you cannot wear them. They remain facades, where vestiges of old architectural designs loom under the modeled impasto color planes
The patterns on the canvases of Kilian are meticulously painted abstractions but seem from a distance no more than a representation of pieces of carpet. This makes the interpretation of his work ambiguous. The constant questioning of meaning, perception and the contradicting forces that underlie Killian’s and Kruysen’s work, is the common and fundamental aspect of both of their artisthoods.

‘HYPERDENSITY’
SOLO SHOW PIM PALSGRAAF
FEBRUARY 17 – APRIL 9 2017

Pim Palsgraaf takes his inspiration from the friction zones and the fringes of the city. The places that are forgotten and where nobody comes, sometimes concealed, waiting for a new destination.

It is in these places where culture and nature meet in a clash: the areas where erosion and nature have free reign in the once solid and indestructible structure of man and where opposites morph into one another.

This process creates, in its very own way, new landscapes and architectural elements: the fragile balance between these two different worlds becomes exposed in an idiosyncratic manner.

The sculpture ‘In the Absence of Light’ of Pim Palsgraaf is on view from September 21 to March 5 2017 in the Kunsthal in Rotterdam

‘MUMMIFIED’
SOLO SHOW JIN KIM
JANUARY 6 – FEBRUARY 10 2017

His paintings of several palaces: Changdeokgung Palace in Korea, the Forbidden City in China, the Royal Palace of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the Palace of Versailles in France, and Osaka Castle in Japan where power reigned, are central to this new series. Now maybe still alive in a snapshot from a passing tourist, these ‘mummified’ palaces and their inhabitants were symbols of authority and oppression in the past. They are strangely similar though to the ‘power houses’ of politics, economy and media in modern day life, where the need for capitalism is prevalent. By chasing this ideal, they forget the needs of the people they govern.

A recent political scandal in South Korea reinforces the thoughts that Jim Kim has on the corrupting nature of capitalism. It inspired him to create this series, giving it a more political narrative than previous work.

His new work gazes at the old glories of the past through a window. These withered palaces are synonym to the powers they beheld and sometimes still behold. The layer created by the window separates the work and the viewer. The rough brushstrokes enforce this quality, while the perceived light in the paintings make the space look like an organism. Through out the ‘mummified’ spaces in his paintings Kim would like to describe the people who are still not democratic and exist only for the benefits of a few specific groups with power.

‘The reason art touches our hearts or the reason we want to be touched by art must be, because we all believe that there is something special in art that can change our lives.’ Jin Kim